service, the candidate asks for entry into religion in the name of Jesus Christ and in “worshipe of his holy modir mari virgyn” (Rewyll fol. 49r). A red banner depicting Christ’s body on one side and that of the Virgin Mary on the other precedes the candidates in the procession “so that the newe spowse beholdyng þe signe of the newe spouse sufferyng on the crosse. lerne paciens and pouerte. And in beholdyng the virgyn modir: lerne chastite and mekenes” (Rewyll fol. 49r). The candidate is simultaneously to become Christ’s “newe spowse” and “virgyn modir.” Furthermore, while the bishop may stand in for Christ the spouse and for the nun’s father, the candidate too can align herself with Christ, from whom she is to learn.52 Mary and Christ, represented so frequently in Brigittine texts as co-redemptors,53 are portrayed as two sides of the same coin, so to speak, providing equally important models for identity formation.
The instruction to Brigittine novices to learn chastity and meekness from Mary shows, on one level, the dominance of a traditional ideology of female spirituality in Brigittine texts. Brigittine texts also, however, represent Mary’s meekness and chastity as empowering qualities, as sources of authority. For instance, in the Liber celestis, the definitive collection of Birgitta’s revelations which was translated at least twice into Middle English, Christ compares Mary to “a flowr þat grew in a vale, a-bowte which vale wer v high mountaynes.”54 He identifies Mary with the vale for the “mekenes” which she had “a-fore all oþer,” and he continues by saying, “This vale passed v mountaynes.”55 Thus, Mary’s meekness raises her above five Old Testament leaders—Moses, Eli, Sampson, David, and Solomon. Christ also declares that Mary’s chastity makes her even greater than the clergy, his earthly representatives; he says, “In thyn abstynence þu arte more than any confessore.”56
Nuptial imagery, with all the baggage it carries, is thus not the only identity-shaping imagery available in Brigittine profession. The Brigittine consecration service contains a “complex cluster of ideas—virginity, marriage, intercourse, fertility” which lies at its heart.57 While in the Benedictine profession service maternal reproduction is recast as the priestly production of new nuns, the language of the hymn accompanying the procession into the chapter house following the consecration highlights pointedly the combination of maternal and nuptial possibilities available to Brigittine nuns. While processing, the community sings sponse iungendo filio, which is also sung at compline on Thursdays; one line reads, “The wombe of mary is the chambre. her soule is the spousesse.”58 The hymn emphasizes:
that the virginal conception of Christ was, at the same time, an intimate intercourse between him and the soul of the Virgin Mary which produced a whole host of “fayre children.” … The newly professed is thus truly what the Extrauagantes first called her, a daughter of the Virgin…. She is also … the spouse of the Virgin’s son: at the same time, therefore, daughter, wife, and mother to be …, herself another Virgin Mary.59
Like the banner in the consecration service, the identity of the new Brigittine nun has more than one side.
It is quite appropriate that the Brigittine and Franciscan traditions work in their profession services, and, as we shall see, in their visitation practices, to shape religious identities which celebrate female spiritual power. Both orders originated with women who were profoundly committed to developing new, distinctive roles for women in religious life, and both share a common heritage of later medieval continental religious protofeminism. The Brigittine Rule, divinely revealed to St. Birgitta and ordained, in accordance with Christ’s command, “first and principally by women,” strives, in spite of affinities with the Cistercian tradition, to “dissociate itself from existing monastic practice.”60 Birgitta’s design of a double order headed by an abbess, which was extremely unusual in the fourteenth century, also likely harkens back to an earlier attempt to carve out new religious possibilities for women—the creation of the Fontevrauldine Order by Robert of Abrissel.61
St. Clare of Assisi devoted her life to procuring the privilege of poverty (in her view the defining aspect of Franciscan identity) for her community at San Damiano, and she, together with Blessed Agnes of Prague, succeeded in having Pope Innocent IV remove the requirement that the nuns observe, even formaliter, the Rule of St. Benedict. The early versions of the Franciscan Rule for nuns were revised by Blessed Isabella, sister of Louis IX of France, into a distinctive modification known as the Isabella Rule, which, although it does not embrace the radical poverty so loved by Clare, seeks to underline the equality of Franciscan nuns and friars. That the nuns and friars are, to borrow Penelope Johnson’s terms, “equal in monastic profession,” is underlined by the Isabella Rule’s specification that the women who follow it be called “Minoresses,” so indicating their “privileged position” and “closer connection with the ‘Fratres Minores’ than the rest of the Order.”62 It is this rule which was followed by the English Franciscan nuns.
Through the origins of their orders in Sweden, Italy, and France, English Brigittines and Franciscans were linked with such continental developments in female spirituality as the “feminization of sanctity.”63 Ties with continental innovations in religious practices were furthered by the direct connections of English houses of Franciscan and Brigittine nuns with those in France and Scandinavia. English houses of Minoresses were settled with nuns from Isabella’s foundation of Longchamp in the diocese of Paris, and nuns from the Brigittine motherhouse in Vadstena came to facilitate the beginnings of the community at Syon. Textual circulation also reinforced ties with burgeoning new forms of female spirituality across the Channel. Syon, for instance, possessed a copy of The Orchard of Syon, a Middle English translation of the Dialogues of Catherine of Siena. In these regards, the opportunities for independence both spiritual and secular offered to English Brigittine and Franciscan nuns in their profession services were part of a much larger social phenomenon.
Visitation Documents and Gendered Identity
Episcopal visitation, like profession, plays an important part in the construction of religious identity, since in visitation every element of monastic life, from performing divine service to serving meals, comes under scrutiny. Visitation also has long-term consequences, since the injunctions become part of the statutes of the house, superseding previous documents of the same kind. In visitation, documents impacting religious identity proliferate. During a typical visitation of a Benedictine religious house, upon the arrival of the diocesan, a clerk preached a sermon, and then the head of the house presented a certificate of the receipt of the summons to visitation and of its delivery to the various persons summoned. Next, the head of the house was required to exhibit certificates of election, confirmation by the diocesan, and installation in office. The superior then had to exhibit the foundation charter as well as information concerning the current financial condition of the house. Through this documentary profusion, the house accounted for its temporal circumstances and reaffirmed its material origins.
After these preliminaries of communal accountability, the business of personal accountability began. Members of the house appeared singly before the bishop or sometimes before clerks deputed to examine members simultaneously. Notaries took down the depositions, known as detecta, and then the comperta (matters discovered by the bishop) were formed from the detecta and the results of preliminary inquiry. At the end of the visitation proceedings, the visitor published the detecta and comperta to the assembled community and delivered brief verbal injunctions. Finally, soon after his departure, he sent written injunctions to the community which were added to the statutes of the house.64
The textual transactions associated with episcopal visitation have often been considered formulaic and homogenous across orders and genders;65 just as the important imaginative work of constructing gendered identities gets done in profession services, however, so too is it performed through the seemingly bland official language of visitation documents. While it is true that episcopal visitation was a fact of monastic life for monks and nuns alike, in England nuns were more subject than
